Fellowship in Early Relational Health

Training Description

A comprehensive, part-time, hybrid, 18-month training program ​
in early relational health research, theory, assessment, and relationship-based interventions, designed for interdisciplinary professionals ranging in their scope of clinical/research practice, and systems of care,  including: ​

• Neurodevelopmental models of risk and resilience, effects of trauma on early relationships and early brain development ​
  
  
• Therapeutic interventions with infants and families (including dyadic and family systems psychotherapies, the therapeutic use of videotape with families, and evidence-based models supporting early relational health and development, such as Circle of Security, Child Parent Psychotherapy, Theraplay®, DIR® Floortime, Child First, and more ​
  
  
• Infant/early childhood observation and relationship-based assessment tools and measures. Specialized Trainings in NBO, NCAST Parent-Child Interaction Scales, Theraplay Marschak Interaction Method, DC:0-5, and many other diagnostic tools ​
  
  
• Research, diagnosis and multidisciplinary approaches to treating infant regulatory disorders, social communication disorders, anxiety disorders in young children, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the effects of trauma on early relationships and early brain development ​
  
  
• Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders and therapeutic interventions supporting the transition to parenthood​
  
  
• Diversity Informed Tenets of IECMH; examining implicit bias in developmental science; diversity, equity and inclusion in IECMH workforce development and service delivery models; social determinants of health in a relational context​
  
  
• Understanding infant and early childhood systems of care; child welfare system; court-based models of intervention ​
  
  
• Reflective practice/facilitated integration of course materials with individuals’ practice  ​
  
  
• Individualized support from Core Faculty in the development of an Integrated Learning Project: Fellows design a project in second year of program to explore their creative ideas for how to implement change in systems and clinical practices supporting infants, young children and families​
  
  
• Networking and career-development opportunities with a world-wide network of over 250 inter-disciplinary alumni in 23 states and 26 countries, and over 40 ERH faculty​
  
  
• The ERH Fellowship fulfills the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health training and reflective supervision/consultation requirements for the credential: Endorsement for Culturally Sensitive, Relationship-Focused Practice Promoting Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health® as an Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Specialist (Category III) and the Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Mentor (Category IV). 

HOW TO APPLY

IPMH Core Faculty and Leadership:

Chief Faculty, Ed Tronick, PhD

Ed Tronick is a developmental neuroscientist and clinical psychologist and is recognized internationally for his research on infants, children and parenting.  Dr. Tronick is a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at UMass Chan Medical School, a past University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and an Associate Professor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is an honorary member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Contemporary Freudian Society.  He was a founder of the Brazelton Touchpoints program.  He is a founder and co-developer of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship in Napa and Boston, which is now the Fellowship in Early Relational Health at UMass Chan Medical School, where he serves as Chief Faculty.  With Dr. TB Brazelton he co-developed Newborn Assessment Scale.  With Dr. Barry Lester, he developed the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Assessment Scale.  Dr. Tronick developed the Still-Face Paradigm and more recently the Caretaker Acute Stress Paradigm. He continues to do research on the Still-face, effects of maternal depression and other affective disorders on infant and child social emotional development.  His current research focuses on infant memory for stress and the effects of stress on health outcomes.  He has formulated the Mutual Regulation Model and the Dyadic States of Conscious model, both of which are utilized worldwide by researchers on development. He has published more than 300 scientific articles and 7 books, several hundred photographs, and appeared on national radio and television programs.  He is recipient of several awards including the Lifetime Contribution award from Zero to Three and the Scientific Contribution Award from the International Conference on Infant Studies. His research has been funded by NIDA, NICHD, NIMH, NSF and the McArthur Foundation.  He has also served as a permanent member of a NIMH review panel.  He reviews for the National Science Foundations of Canada, the US and Switzerland.  Dr. Tronick has presented his work to analytic societies including Berlin, Milan, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rome, Pittsburgh, NYC, St. Louis, Kansas City and to societies and congresses including the N.Y. Academy of Science, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Marce’ Society, the American Psychoanalytic Meetings, and numerous universities in the US and abroad.

Executive  Director and Core Faculty,
Dorothy T. Richardson, PhD, IECMH-E^Ò

Dorothy T. Richardson, PhD is a Clinical and Developmental Psychologist, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at UMass Chan Medical School, and Executive Director of the UMass Chan Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship.  Dr. Richardson has worked with young children and their families for over 30 years in a teaching, research and clinical capacity.  An early career in neuroscience and psychiatry research led to her interest in early childhood development in the context of family relationships, early childcare settings and the developmental trajectories of risk and resilience.  She has research training at NIH in Developmental Psychopathology, and Child and Adult Psychiatry, including Perinatal Mental Health, and Developmental Medicine training at Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals (MGH, Children’s Hospital and Cambridge Hospital).   

In 2003, Dr. Richardson founded the first community-based outpatient infant-parent mental health clinic in the Boston area, The Rice Center for Young Children and Families at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy, where she served as Clinical Director for 7 years.  The Rice Center is presently housed at The Home for Little Wanderers, where she presently serves on the Rice Center Advisory Board and Training Faculty, where she supervises and trains psychologists and social workers to provide relationship-based clinical interventions to families with young children, and pregnant and post-partum mothers with mood disorders and the integration of sensory-motor interventions with relationship-based parent-child psychotherapies.  Dr. Richardson has served on a number of state advisory committees on Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, was a founder and Past-President of MassAIMH, Birth to Six (Massachusetts’ Chapter of the World Association of Infant Mental Health).  She developed, with Dr. Ed Tronick and Marilyn Davillier, the UMass Boston Infant Parent Mental Health Postgraduate Certificate Program – now the Fellowship in Early Relational Health at UMass Chan Medical School - where she trains an international group of interdisciplinary clinicians (pediatrics, nursing, social work, psychology, occupational therapists and early childhood development specialists) in infant and early childhood neurodevelopmental research, and relationship-based assessment and interventions. Dr. Richardson currently serves as a consultant to several infant-parent mental health clinical intervention programs and projects integrating infant/early childhood/parental mental health within the pediatric setting. She maintains a private practice in Brookline specializing in parent-child dyadic treatment for families with children under the age of six who are dealing with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and infant/early childhood disorders of behavior, communication, mood, adoption and trauma, but also offers support to families for typical developmental questions and concerns and support for parent-child relationships.  She consults to early childcare and education settings throughout the Boston area.  Dr. Richardson earned her Masters’ in Education, in Developmental Psychology, from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Boston University. 

Core Faculty

Throughout the program, a variety of nationally and internationally recognized experts in the field of Infant-Parent Mental Health will be scheduled to join the Fellows and provide training, engage in dialogue, and participate in a case discussion related to their area of expertise and research. Faculty have been carefully selected to provide learners with the opportunity to meet and think with experts and luminaries in the field that have a wide range of disciplines, academic and clinical backgrounds, research expertise, and theoretical approaches. 

Core Faculty, Alexandra Harrison, MD

Core Faculty, Alexandra Harrison, MD Alexandra Harrison, MD earned her BA in art history at Radcliffe College and her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. After an internship in Pediatrics, she completed a psychiatric residency and then a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. At present, she is a Training and Supervising Analyst in adult and child and adolescent analysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry Part Time at Harvard Medical School, Newborn Behavioral Observation Trainer, and CEO of the nonprofit Supporting Child Caregivers. In collaboration with infant researchers, Dr. Harrison has worked to integrate psychoanalytic and infant research theory and practice.  

One outcome of this integration is her “Parent Consultation Model” of child mental health evaluation. Another is her use of social media—blog, podcast, online videos, and tiktoks—to bring helpful information from both psychoanalysis and infant research to parents and other child caregivers, on supportingchildcaregivers.org. She has developed a manualized curriculum in infant parent mental health for front-line caregivers, and in collaboration with local institutions and U.S. colleagues, is studying its effectiveness in rural Pakistan and in El Salvador. Dr. Harrison has presented widely and has published articles about her work in her adult and child mental health literature. 

Core Faculty, Claudia M. Gold, MD

Core Faculty, Claudia M. Gold, MD is a pediatrician and writer who practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for over 20 years and now specializes in early childhood mental health. While working on the front lines in a busy rural practice, she "discovered" the world of research and knowledge in the field of infant mental health through her studies with the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute in the early 2000's. The experience led to a profound transformation of her clinical work with families. She has devoted her professional life to spreading this knowledge through writing, teaching, and public speaking. She is on the faculty of the Early Relational Health fellowship at UMass Chan Medical School, the Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute.  

She developed an infant-parent mental health program at the Austen Riggs Center, which led to creation of the Hello It’s Me Project, a program supporting parent-infant relationships in high-need, low resourced communities, of which she is the Executive Director. Dr. Gold has extensive experience with families hard hit by the opioid crisis in her community in Western Massachusetts, and currently works as a clinician with Volunteers in Medicine, Berkshires serving a primarily immigrant population.   Dr. Gold speaks frequently to a variety of audiences including parents and professionals. Her most recent book, The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience and Trust co-authored with Ed Tronick, was released in June 2020. Her other books include The Developmental Science of Early Childhood (2017), The Silenced Child (2016), and Keeping Your Child in Mind (2011) A fifth book Learning from Babies: How Our Earliest Relationships Teach Us to Navigate Uncertainty and Loss is forthcoming. She writes regularly for her blog Child in Mind. Dr. Gold received her BA from the University of Chicago and MD from U of C Pritzker School of Medicine. 

Core Faculty, Silvia Juarez-Marazzo, LCSW, NCPsyA

Core Faculty, Silvia Juarez-Marazzo, LCSW, NCPsyA is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a Nationally Accredited Adlerian Psychoanalyst. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Silvia fell in love with young children and their inner world when she began to work as an educator for young children with unique emotional needs in vulnerable and rural communities of Buenos Aires, forty years ago. Her work as an educator, psychotherapist, and social worker has been centered on the core belief that there is no such thing as a child: there is a child, his caregiver(s), and their community  

Silvia was a Senior Clinician and Supervisor for Child First Yale-Bridgeport Hospital and Senior Faculty for Child First, Inc. from 2005 to 2016. Child First is an evidenced based early intervention home based program that uses a two prone approach of Child Parent Psychotherapy and reflective care coordination to address the mental health needs of children 0 to 5 and their caregivers in the State of Connecticut.  

From 2016 to 2017, Silvia joined the Early Childhood Consultation Partnership at ABH, Connecticut, bringing Infant Mental Health to the Early Care and Education Settings through her role as Assistant Program Manager.  

Silvia joined Chances for Children in 2018 as Clinical Director and was promoted to Co-Executive Director Clinical in 2020. With more than twenty years of solid outcome evaluations, Chances for Children has provided free clinical group and dyadic services for parents and caregivers with children 0 to 5, strengthening understanding, enhancing sensitivity, and nurturing early relationships.  

Silvia has been an Adjunct Faculty for the Master Program in Social work at Southern Connecticut State University since 2001. She was invited as an Adjunct Faculty for the Infant Parent Mental Health Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts in 2016. Silvia joined the faculty at Brooklyn College’s Department of Early Childhood Education and Arts Education in 2019.  

In 2010, Silvia discovered, through the deeply transformative experience at the Infant Parent Mental Health Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, led by Dr. Ed Tronick, that creating “cuentos,” or short illustrated stories for children, can help scaffold the integration of the Latino-American immigrant mothers’ experiences about their journey into motherhood as a new avenue for both self-discovery and therapeutic action. Silvia’s illustrated children story books for immigrant families, "¡Mamá Cuéntame Como Viniste!” (2013) and "¡Mamá Cuéntame Por Qué Viniste!” (2014) were invited the 2018 and 2019 International Book Fairs in Beijing, Bologna, Frankfurt, and Guadalajara. Her third “cuento” expands on the stories of immigrant parents during the times of the COVID-19 pandemic (in print). Silvia has been a finalist illustrator at the Bologna Book Fair for two consecutive years (2021 and 2022).  

Silvia was the Connecticut Infant Mental Health 2014 Jane C. Award recipient for Excellence and Exemplary Service to Young Children and their Families in the Field of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health. 

Core Faculty, Marilyn Davillier, LICSW

Marilyn R. Davillier is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked with infants, toddlers, children, and their families, in a teaching, research or clinical capacity for over 35 years. What began as a career in the Montessori method of pre-school education led to extensive research experience in Behavioral Pediatrics.  In this capacity, she worked extensively with the psychological tools and measures relevant to infant and child development and co-authored several papers on the long-range developmental outcomes of preterm and drug-exposed infants.

Additional post-licensure trainings include:  The Brazelton Touchpoints Model of Child Development, The Napa Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Fellowship, Perry’s Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Downing’s Video Intervention Therapy (VIT), Sandplay Therapy, and Mindfulness Meditation Training.  Ms. Davillier served as the Associate Director for the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship Program, a nationally acclaimed two-year intensive interdisciplinary fellowship for licensed professionals whose mandate it is to treat the social, emotional and relational derailments that can arise in families with children ages birth to five years.  This fellowship is developmental in orientation, multi-disciplinary in focus, and developed as a primary public health preventive intervention aimed to increase awareness and understanding of the critical role of early relationship support to child development and family well-being.

Ms. Davillier maintains a private practice in Boston that specializes in the parent-child dyadic model of treatment for families with young children under the age of six years of age who are dealing with disorders of behavior, regulation, communication, mood, adoption and trauma.  Related therapeutic services also include:  Parent Consultation, Family Therapy, Play/Art/Sandtray therapy for elementary and middle-school aged children, Adolescent Psychotherapy, and Couples Therapy. 

Ms. Davillier lectures both nationally and internationally on meaning-making in the clinical treatment of young children, the importance of limit setting, family narratives, and the use of literature to promote resilience in the private life of the child.  She is currently writing a fairy tale. 

Core Faculty, Aditi Subramaniam, LMHC, R-DMT, IECMH-E^®  

Aditi is a licensed mental health clinician and registered movement psychotherapist with more than fifteen years of experience in the field of mental health, in India and Boston. She currently works at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Children (MSPCC) leading a statewide partnership between MSPCC and the Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health (MassAIMH) focused on enhancing, diversifying, and supporting the infant mental health workforce with the goal of improving access to services for children age birth – 6 and their families. 

Her areas of interest include reflective practice; community and family-focused initiatives that are integrated with social justice principles; workforce and systems development; healing-centered care; and the integration of the expressive arts in psychotherapy in working with families and systems. 

She is a national trainer at the Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital, for the Newborn Behavior Observation, and at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center as a National Touchpoints trainer. Ms. Subramaniam is a graduate of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Fellowship Program and a graduate of the Infant Observation Course at the Infant-Parent Training Institute of Jewish Family & Children’s Service. She has served as faculty at the Jewish Family and Children's Services Infant-Parent Training Institute. Her experience includes dyadic early childhood clinical work, family engagement, and working with systems to build capacity in justice-informed early childhood mental health. The principles and practices of social justice and the arts in psychotherapy are embedded in her everyday work and lens. She is Endorsed as an Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Mentor- Clinical and lives in Boston, MA with her husband and daughter. She is a trained Indian classical dancer and continues to enjoy dancing, yoga, and making art and is humbled by parenting and learning from the tiny wonders of childhood with her daughter.

Berry Brazelton †, MD (1918-2018): 

Dr. Brazelton was Clinical Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and an internationally renowned pediatrician. He has published over 300 papers and chapters, and 40 books. His dual interest in pediatrics and child psychiatry led to his founding the Child Development Unit in 1972 at Children’s Hospital Boston. His research has focused on differences among newborns, the newborn’s contribution to the parent-infant relationship, attachment, cross-cultural studies, early intervention, the Face-to-Face Still Face Paradigm, and relationship-based care. He developed the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale used worldwide to assess newborns and inform caregivers about the newborn’s behavioral language and established the Brazelton Institute to forward NBAS training and research. He developed the Touchpoints Model, a training program for providers serving families with young children and founded the Brazelton Touchpoints Center to support this work. He has received awards worldwide and his series “What Every Baby Knows” was the longest running parenting show on television. He was awarded the Presidential Citizen’s Medal by President Obama in February 2013. He earned his MD at Columbia University 70 years ago, completed pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital Boston, and trained in child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was a founding board member of Zero To Three.